Medical Affairs teams do a lot but often have a hard time demonstrating their value. Here is a simple way to help: Track Your Progress to Demonstrate Value. This is a super effective hack to show your and/or your team’s impact. It’s easy to get caught up in the minutia and not see how all these small daily tasks add up to huge progress toward accomplishing goals and value. With a good progress tracking habit in place you will be able to easily see how much you and your team accomplishes and then use this to:

✨Demonstrate value
✨Motivate yourself and/or the team
✨Make smarter decisions

Small Daily Tasks Add Up to Big Progress

This hack is inspired by my big 2023 review. I reread all my journal entries and daily planners to look for trends and insights. A huge insight popped out during this review: I was way more productive and made way more progress than I thought.

At the time, I thought I wasn’t making any progress toward my goals. Looking back, I could see that I was wildly productive but I couldn’t see it because I was caught up in the busyness of my day-to-day.

This is something we all do. We forget that small daily tasks add up to big progress and fail to appreciate how much we do! There is always a lot to do. We spend too much time focusing on what we haven’t done, rather than celebrating the small wins. Track your progress to convince yourself and others that you are having an impact.

How to Track Your Progress to Demonstrate Value

Focus on your company’s objectives and your team goals. Create a tracking habit around those with a daily log of everything you and/or your team does. I can feel a lot of you rolling your eyes at me right now. It doesn’t have to be a huge time-consuming thing. Take a few minutes to jot down the big wins/activities from the day. If you struggle with identifying your needle-moving activities, check out the How to Plan Your Month For Maximum Impact as an MSL and the MSL Impact Template Bundle.

Tracking Progress Tips For MSL Leads

Make the strategy and focus areas crystal clear to your MSLs. Ask them to provide weekly updates on these focus areas. You can use these to show what the team is working on and the impact they are having.

Here is a launch readiness example. Track key launch activities such as MSL insights regarding the Ph3 data, collaboration with cross-functional partners, and relationships built with key HCPs. Ask your MSLs to give you weekly updates on a few key areas. Then you can create a report to share with cross-functional colleagues and your manager to highlight the team’s impact.

Tracking Progress Tips for MSLs

Review your company’s objectives and team initiatives. Determine your key impact metrics related to the strategy and create a log to track those (check out this simple 5 step progress for how to plan your month for maximum impact as an MSL). Here are some examples to help you think of what you may want to track.

Example 1: Your product is approved for an additional indication and the MSL team needs to ensure that the sales team is field ready. An MSL can track the number of trainings provided to the sales team.

Example 2: You have a new territory and are working toward building relationships with your key HCPs. You may want to track activities you have completed that have contributed to getting established in your territory:

– Congresses attended
– New HCPs met with and next steps

Not only do you have a way to see how much progress you are making toward your goals, you also have something concrete to share with your manager. Use this MSL Insights Yearly Review Template as inspiration to set up your own tracking progress log.

Pro-Tip: Track Your Progress Daily

Have you noticed how quickly you forget things? That happens to everyone. It’s part of being human. Avoid this by tracking your progress daily. It only takes a few minutes! Check out this article on Reviewing Your Goals Daily for inspiration and this article on how to develop a weekly reset habit. 

Conclusion

Remember tracking progress is about seeing how small daily tasks add up to huge progress and impact. The small things add up! Life Sciences company objectives and the goals of Medical Affairs teams are not one-and-done tasks. They often require many small steps to accomplish the larger goal.

When you see all the progress you and/or the team are making, you will feel motivated, have an easy way to show impact, and be able to use this to make smarter decisions.

What are your thoughts? How do you keep track of your progress and show impact?